3D & Sculpture | artistvenu

Elaborate Designs by Mitsuru Nikaido Transform Animals and Insects into Complex LEGO Robots

December 29, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Image © Mitsuru Nikaido

Kurashiki-based builder Mitsuru Nikaido reimagines marine life, insects, and land animals as mechanical, robot-like characters built entirely with LEGO. Using his signature palette of gray and white bricks and unique parts, Nikaido creates spring-loaded limbs for walruses, a gecko tail capable of swinging toward its body, and spiders that appear like they could scurry away on hinged legs. The semi-articulate specimens shown here are just a few of the designer’s elaborate mecha sculptures, more of which you can find on Flickr and Instagram.

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Liz Larner: Unstill Life

December 22, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Liz Larner: 2001, 2001, fiberglass, stainless steel, and automotive paint, 12 by 12 by 12 feet. COURTESY REGEN PROJECTS

WHAT IS IN A BREATH? In 1988, at a group show in Graz, Austria, Liz Larner asked her fellow artists to exhale onto an agar culture that she had prepared in a petri dish, like a medical professional testing for disease. Larner put the work on display, and over the course of the show’s run, the accumulated bacteria grew into menacing blooms, which eventually died, turning black. The Los Angeles artist titled the piece Every Artist Gave a Breath (Graz ’88), a name at once poetic and slyly poignant, like so much of her work.

This was a heady career moment for Larner, then just three years out of the California Institute of Arts, where she had focused on photography. She had started making cultures the previous year, with Orchid, Buttermilk, Penny (1987), whose title names the ingredients she had placed in a dish.

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Concentric Vessels Nest Within Larger Forms in Matthew Chambers’ Perplexing Ceramic Sculptures

December 15, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Image © Matthew Chambers

At once minimal and endlessly confounding, the elegant ceramic vessels that Matthew Chambers (previously) creates are precisely scaled iterations of the same shape. His hypnotic sculptures are comprised of individual, wheel-thrown pieces in varying sizes that are embedded within a larger form. Each abstract work is unique in color and position, sometimes displaying single monochromatic rings at incongruent angles or striped colors flush in alignment.

In a note to Colossal, Chambers says his most recent pieces are an experiment in allowing the inner pattern to pop from the outer vessel.

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In ‘Boogey Men,’ Monumental New Works by Hugh Hayden Reflect on American Culture and Politics

December 11, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

mages courtesy of ICA Miami, by Zachary Balber

An exhibition now on view at ICA Miami samples the recurring themes and motifs that are central to artist Hugh Hayden’s body of work: twisting flames spout from a wooden Adirondack chair and spindly twigs envelop a massive skeleton carved from bald Cyprus trees, two works that evoke the Dallas native’s barbed furniture and embedded branch designs. In a suspended installation comprised of metallic instruments and pots, faces mimicking traditional African masks emerge from copper cookware similar to the cast iron skillets he presented last year.

The metaphorical new pieces comprise Boogey Men, Hayden’s solo show that responds to myriad social dynamics, cultural issues, and an increasingly tense political environment through imposing, anthropomorphic forms and more subtle works. At the center of the exhibition space is a hammered stainless steel car disguised by a sheet painted in white.

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Illuminated Dinosaurs Stalk Paris’s Jardin des Plantes in a Spectacular Journey Through Time

December 7, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Image © China Light Festival B.V.& Sichuan Tianyu Culture Communication Co., Ltd

Trilobites, luminous flying raptors, and a T-Rex towering 27 meters above the ground are just a few of the otherworldly creatures currently haunting the grounds of the Jardin des Plantes. The massive organisms are the subjects of a fantastic exhibition now on view at the Paris venue that takes viewers on a spectacular journey of development and biodiversity through the ages.

Populated by hand-painted silk sculptures crafted by the Sichuan-based company China Lights, Evolution on a Path to Enlightenment opens about 3,700 million years ago with the Precambrian era’s marine creatures.

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Carved Organic Patterns Highlight the Natural Wood Grain of Carbonized Mahogany

November 23, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

“Artifact II” (2020), carbonized mahogany and metal, 52.25 x 11.875 x 2 inches. Image courtesy of TERN Gallery.

In Splinters and Shards, artist John Beadle enriches the beauty of wood’s natural grain with a series of gouged dots, line carvings, and smooth, supple curves. His small, circular sculptures and vertical towers accentuate the texture and subtle gradients of carbonized mahogany through etched patterns that reveal the pristine reddish hue peeking through the charred surface. Always highlighting the potential of the raw material, Beadle, whose background is in painting and printmaking, evokes these mediums through layering dimension and motif in a single work and drawing on the subtraction inherent in carving into a blank woodblock.

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Ornate Rugs by Artist Faig Ahmed Ooze Onto the Floor in Drippy Fabric Puddles

November 20, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Image courtesy of Sapar Contemporary

Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed (previously) has amassed a staggering archive of sculptural carpets that blur the boundaries of digital distortion and traditional craft techniques. Often monumental in scale, his fringed rugs are woven with classic, ornate patterns on top before they billow into a pool of glitches and skewed motifs.

Ahmed weaves conceptual and historical relevances into his most recent trio, which is on view as part of his solo show PIR at New York’s Sapar Contemporary through January 6, 2022. Each piece draws its name from a spiritual leader who profoundly impacted Azerbaijani culture, including Shams Tabrizi, Yahya al-Shirvani al-Bakuvi, and Nizami Ganjavi.

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Ephemeral Compositions Use Sand and Stone to Create Hypnotic Works on Land

November 20, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

The wildly prolific Wales-based artist Jon Foreman has spent much of 2021 on a new batch of mesmerizing land pieces. Expanding on the swirling, organic shapes he’s known for, many of his recent works take on minimal, geometric formations in diagonal stripes or colorful, concentric circles. Foreman created a 2022 calendar featuring some of the compositions shown here—ordering instructions are on his Instagram—and you can find prints of his ephemeral pieces in his shop.

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Artificial Organisms: Shimmering Digital Creatures Undulate and Pulse with Light in Maxim Zhetskov’s New Film

November 11, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

In “Artificial Organisms,” Russian director Maxim Zhestkov (previously) enlivens machine intelligence to create palpitating marine organisms that radiate with vibrant bands of light. The hulking, life-like specimens, which are comprised of countless individual spheres, are presented floating in undulating masses or enveloping a stark white structure in groups evocative of a coral reef. Each piece fuses the artificial and organic, producing “a bizarre world of mesmerizing digital creatures,” Zhestkov says. “A combination of biological symmetry and impeccable digital matter, they are a representation of budding artificial intelligence.”

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Vintage Objects and Driftwood Form Minimal Animal Sculptures and Quaint Seaside Scenes

November 11, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

From hunks of driftwood and tins with chipped paint, Kirsty Elson (previously) assembles minimal sculptures of animals, homes, and methods of transportation. The Cornwall-based artist highlights the raw simplicity of her found objects and lets the materials drive the works, manipulating cragged planks or bent hooks just slightly to achieve their intended forms.

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Category: 3D & Sculpture

Elaborate Designs by Mitsuru Nikaido Transform Animals and Insects into Complex LEGO Robots

Liz Larner: Unstill Life

Concentric Vessels Nest Within Larger Forms in Matthew Chambers’ Perplexing Ceramic Sculptures

In ‘Boogey Men,’ Monumental New Works by Hugh Hayden Reflect on American Culture and Politics

Illuminated Dinosaurs Stalk Paris’s Jardin des Plantes in a Spectacular Journey Through Time

Carved Organic Patterns Highlight the Natural Wood Grain of Carbonized Mahogany

Ornate Rugs by Artist Faig Ahmed Ooze Onto the Floor in Drippy Fabric Puddles

Ephemeral Compositions Use Sand and Stone to Create Hypnotic Works on Land

Artificial Organisms: Shimmering Digital Creatures Undulate and Pulse with Light in Maxim Zhetskov’s New Film

Vintage Objects and Driftwood Form Minimal Animal Sculptures and Quaint Seaside Scenes

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